Goodness gracious, so much for my expected relaxing slide into the holiday week. Frenzy has broken out at the office. Everyone wants to get their legal affairs finished before the holidays. I've never seen anything like it. It's common for this time of year to be busy with year-end transactions (for tax reasons, it's useful to finish business sales before January 1st), but those transactions are usually looming for months: you see them coming and you prepare ahead of time. I have no such deals this year (which is odd, I usually have a couple), but instead I've been blitzed with last-second stuff out of the blue. Yesterday, I put a moratorium on all new appointments and started holding my calls. I hate doing that (too greedy), but I'm already working part of Christmas Eve when the rest of the office is shut down. I refuse to work all of Christmas Eve, or I'll be exhausted from work and stress on Christmas.
No matter how bad things get, though, I always remember: it beats the opposite (no work and clients). Of course, that assumes clients are paying their bills, but that's another lament. For now, suffice it to say that the non-paying callers have been back-burnered to 2008. I either do that or irritate my paying clients by not getting their work done, and that simply isn't smart for me or fair to them. The non-paying clients rarely understand that logic, but I simply don't care, as long as I'm not truly leaving them hanging or committing malpractice or committing an unethical breach of responsibility. The season of charity isn't the season of charity in the practice of law.
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Great list: The shortest celebrity marriages. The competition to make this list is intense, but there are some good ones there that I'd forgotten (the brain is merciful).
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This story's okay, but it would be better if there had been a confrontation: A thief who stole a car after spotting the keys in the ignition swiftly abandoned it when he was confronted by a great dane that had been asleep on the back seat.
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This video isn't as great as it's billed, but it's not bad. Since I'm short on blogging time today, I'm posting it. It shows a driver losing his temper in a car wash:
